I have experienced similar, if not the same behavior with both 1.6 and
-current. That kind of lock-up has only happened to me when there's
either a disk-related problem or overheated processor, but I've never
used the multiprocessor kernel.
One time, I just had the RAID partitions misaligned on the disk(s): It
ran fine for a few weeks, but got worse as time went on and more of the
drive was being used. Then after a few weeks of putting-up with the
intermittent lock-ups it got to the point where the parity re-write
locked it up. Needless to say, a new disklabel fixed her right up.
Another time it was a bad IDE controller...It never hurts to keep a few
around for testing. And yet another time it was a dying HDD.
So, if you haven't already:
- check your disklabels. even the slightest mistake could lead to this
problem.
- check your dmesg for any nasty looking I/O messages during disk and
controller initialization.
- eliminate one hardware component at a time.
Maybe that'll help you determine whether you need to update the kernel
or not. Then again, it might be easier to upgrade/downgrade before
checking all that other stuff... s'up to you.
Good luck,
~Mike.
Lubos Vrbka wrote:
> hi guys,
>
> i've got -current running on 2 processor i386 (p3 800) machine. from
> time to time the whole machine freezes and i can do nothing with it -
> no keyboard response, no network response... the only thing i can do
> is to reset... (hapenned to me twice today :o(, happens randomly ~once
> per week).
>
> i inspected logs but found nothing. seems that the last thing my
> computer was doing before crash was restarting syslogd.
> from my observations, the hangups happen only when i i'm working (i'm
> running X from 1.6.1 stable) on the machine, mainly when accesing
> harddrive. it's interesting that i ran several few hours long
> calculations that use harddrive quite a lot, but no crash...
>
> when i used 1.6.1 stable and -current compiled without multiprocessor
> support i didn't observe such behaviour, but i ran them only short
> time, so maybe i just "missed" the crash...
>
> any hints? should i update my system again?
>
> please cc-me with your replies as i'm not subscribed to current-users.
> thanks.
>
> regards,
> lubos
>
>
>